“The question we should be asking right now is: Do we rebuild I-95 as is, or do we rethink the whole thing?” said Harris Steinberg, who runs the nonprofit consulting firm PennPraxis, which developed a waterfront policy for the city in 2007. The Obama administration’s interest in urban areas, he said, “has given the city a license to do something bold.”

Actually, what Hack and Steinberg envision is less a Big Dig than a No Dig.

Instead of burying the highway in an expensive tunnel, they would entirely rip out a stretch of I-95 that runs south of the Ben Franklin Bridge and I-676. Traffic volume drops off there, proponents argue, because the bulk of the highway’s users are commuting into Center City from the north. Airport travelers, they point out, can take I-676 to I-76.

I think we probably ought to take all these “Urban Planners” and launch them into the sun. And once you have this delightful waterfront, what then? The Rainbow Farting Unicorns are going prance along and suddenly Philadelphia will renew itself? No. It won’t. It’s a crappy place to live, and a crappy place to do business or spend money. Fixing that is easier, and will do a lot more to revitalize the city than any crazy notion that if we just jackhammer enough highway, and inconvenience enough people, prosperity will return. If I were paying taxes to that city, I’d be furious they are wasting time and money on this nonsense. The Underpants Gnomes would be proud.

I view her like the VC in the rice paddy at the end of the runway. We knew he was there, and we knew he was shooting at our planes as they took off, but since he had never hit one, we left him there as his replacement might prove to be a better shot.

This kind of thing is very serious. What will the British do? It’s pretty clear Obama is not willing to stand up to these cretins who run Iran, and will readily abandon close allies in order to make a deal with the regime. What Europe is witnessing is a taste of what is to come if the United States withdraws from the world stage.

Europe is on its own. I hate that it’s that way, but hey, hope and change has come.

The Defensive Handgun blog takes down a notion floated by the CSGV that we could disarm everyone by drafting all American citizens into a new, federal militia. I think the supremely ironic thing about this proposal is that it is exactly what the anti-federalist were afraid of — that if the national government had plenary power over the militia, they could use that power to disarm the militia. The federalists, namely James Madison, chose to deal with this concern by recognizing, through the Second Amendment, that the people had the right to keep and bear arms. I think it’s amusing that the gun banners just came up with a scheme that was the reason the Second Amendment exists in the first place.